Why believe in the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb? Whether or not someone sees the Bible as an authority, there is data we can take seriously as we begin to investigate historical facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus. Consider these three arguments

Do we not understand what it means to be “conditioned”, thus experiencing a “limited” frame of reference. Are we not all conditioned by the flesh, thus distorting our view and understanding of scripture. The “sources” that you desire would do me no good, you would still be limited in your very paradigm of the Creation and would by nature force such facts to fit your preconceived notions. So it is that first I must address your ability to perceive, rather than debate endlessly over doctrinal viewpoints often from those who themselves possess such limitations. That being said, lets first address you (and others), we begin our conscious lives in this body we call the flesh, we have a “subjective” experience at every minute of every day within our bodies. That experience entails the duality of “Pain and Pleasure”. The soul, consciousness, mind, grows up under such influence, but their is a built in deception to this subjective experience, that deception is in the fact that “Pain and Pleasure” impact us in such a way that our reality is divided into a duality that implied “Being”, or “realness” on either side of that duality.

Some suggest that the language of “captives” refers to enemies of God who have been taken against their will—a sort of subjugated death march. A better and more likely understanding is that the “captives” in view are those who were taken captive by the enemies of God, and it is these whom God has come to rescue. That would certainly fit the theme and flow of the psalm more closely, and it would carry the idea of God as not only divine warrior but also divine rescuer. More importantly, this view also seems to accord with what Paul says in Ephesians 4, where he quotes and expounds upon Psalm 68:18. There, Paul explains how Christ fulfills Psalm 68 not simply in His resurrection, but particularly through His ascension (Eph. 4:8–10). Christ conquered sin and death (our great enemies) and led out rescued captives, whom He has not only freed but furnished with gifts. Many have stumbled over the fact that in Psalm 68:18 it says that God “received” gifts from men, but in Ephesians 4:8 Paul says God “gave” gifts to men. Which is it? Both. Those whom God liberated not only gave gifts (themselves being the gifts), but they were also furnished by the Spirit of God with gifts for service in the church and thus became the “gifts” that the resurrected and ascended Christ would give to His church for its building up.

In ancient Jerusalem, families often shared tombs where deceased family and friends were laid on stone shelves. Bodies were “wrapped in grave-cloths along with a significant amount of spices, to offset the smell of putrification, on the usual assumption that other shelves in the cave would be required soon.” [1] Then after a year, the family would return and “collect the bones, fold them reverently and carefully…and place them in an ossuary.” [2] This would count as the second burial and cleared tomb space for future burials.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

I had a conversation with a close friend a few years ago, and he asked me a question that I chewed on for days afterward: Do those of us who adhere to the doctrines of grace tend to downplay the resurrection of Christ? Do we, in our drive to make everything gospel-centered and cross-saturated unintentionally underemphasize the final miracle in the doctrines of grace, the vindication of the Son by the Father in the empty tomb?

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

In the ancient world, eyewitness testimony and miracles were considered strong evidence to believe the truthfulness of something. When Moses asked Pharaoh to free the Israelites, he performed various signs to prove the power of God (Exod. 7:8–12). Likewise, the apostles argued that their faith was true because God raised Jesus from the dead (1 Cor. 15:14–19). Today, however, people tend not to believe in miracles. They are considered superstitious and impossible, given the supposed greater knowledge of the world we now have through science.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

I’ve learned something important from the fraud investigators who have joined our homicide team over the years. Con artists are successful if, and only if, they know more about the focus of their lie, than the people to whom they are lying. If you’re trying to con someone out of money in a phony investment scheme, you better know more about investment businesses than your victims. You’ll need to sound like you know what you’re doing if you want to convince someone to give you their money, and they better not be able to detect your deception. So if someone wanted to con those closest to Jesus into believing that Jesus had actually risen from the dead, he would need to know Jesus (his mannerisms, figures of speech and behaviors) better than the disciples themselves. Who could know Jesus this well? I think it would have to be someone in the inner circle, and this person would have to begin by stealing the body; a difficult feat for a single person. It’s not long before imposter theories turn into theories that Involve co-conspirators, and I’ve written an entire chapter of Cold-Case Christianity to explain why conspiracies are so difficult to execute successfully.

Here, Hume is assuming to know the intellect of people who claim to have seen miracles, that claims to the miraculous come from those without the background knowledge to differentiate between a natural and an unnatural act. The problem is, evidenced by ancient burial rituals, an understanding existed that the dead stay dead and the deceased were done with their bodies and to burn or bury them would have no consequence. It does not seem to take a contemporary intellect to know this, and in the case of the resurrection of Jesus, even his disciples had their reservations about His resurrection. Did the disciples not stand in awe when Jesus calmed the storm, recognizing no human thought or command can control the weather, thus realizing there is a deterministic factor in nature? (Mark 4:39) Even the miracles Jesus performed amazed his audience as much as the wisdom expressed in his teaching and they both authenticated each other. A resurrection simply did not fit with their expectations.

Many events in ancient literature cannot be verified due to a lack of data. Moreover, the metanarrative in the Gospels is beyond the reach of historians. The metanarrative is that God’s uniquely divine Son has come into the world to save us and has since returned to heaven where he shares a throne with his Father and will return in the future to judge the world. This metanarrative, of course, cannot be confirmed by historians who simply do not have the tools capable of confirming such things. This doesn’t mean the metanarrative is false. But it does mean it cannot be HISTORICALLY confirmed.

"Greater Love Hath No Man . . ." Much of the story you may have heard, for it made headlines around the world. What has not received as much attention is Lt. Col. Betrame’s faith journey, but it’s an important part of the story, too. http://bit.ly/2uBpuw2 pic.twitter.com/0UH0LbM6jZ

On the way to the cross 2,000 years ago, Jesus took the ultimate indignity and ultimate pain to bring us back to the dignity of a relationship with God and the healing of our souls.
Will we remember this was done for us and receive His gift? http://bit.ly/2Gm8QC1 #GoodFriday

“I thirst.” God once thirsted, like we do. He bled, as we do, in this existence of fallen people and a fallen world. In Christ, God entered the world of human suffering, suffered Himself, defeated suffering and now has the scars to prove it. http://bit.ly/2pQrOKi pic.twitter.com/Afsux5pAwT

"Why is Good Friday Good?" Gather friends/neighbors/co-workers for 20 mins to consider this question on Facebook live at 12:00 ET today - https://www.facebook.com/Radical.net/ pic.twitter.com/sjakAPjl6q

The reports of Jesus’s baptism in the Gospels are straightforward: Jesus is baptized by John, the Spirit descends like a dove, the Father announces his pleasure. At the same time, these concise accounts are allusively dense portraits, effulgent with multi-layered Old Testament resonance.
As we hear the echoes of Scripture in the baptism of Christ, as we swim in the biblical streams that converge in the Jordan River, we begin to appreciate this revelatory event that looks backward to God’s faithful acts in history as it points forward to Christ’s work at the cross.
New Creation
In Genesis 1, God forms creation through the waters of chaos as the Spirit hovers—birdlike—over the face of the deep, and God sees it is good. This same nexus of themes emerges, intensified, in the flood account of Genesis 6–9. Creation dies under the chaotic waters of divine judgment and rises again renewed, its blessed recreation confirmed by dove and divine word. Noah leads a remnant through the flood of wrath and into the new creation, commissioned as head of a new humanity—a second Adam.
Jesus too is covered by the waters of judgment.

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#JohnStonestreet discusses the #Bible as the unshakeable foundation of #truth ! With the approach of #Easter , John also highlights the need to share the Gospel as he talks about the historicity of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection.
http://bit.ly/2IeNgjG pic.twitter.com/TxROs4QRqD

Humiliation and agony. This was the path Jesus chose with which to reach out for you and me. This thing we call sin, but so tragically minimize, breaks the grandeur for which we were created. It brings indignity to our essence and pain to our existence. It separates us from God.

In this new edition of a modern classic, Thomas Howard contrasts the Christian and secular worldviews, refreshing our minds with the illuminated view of Christianity as it imbued the world in times past–showing that we cannot live meaningful lives without this Christian understanding of things. This is an inspiring apology for Christianity, and a stirring critique of secularism.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history.
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While some of his theological judgments are questionable or sketchy (he is not clear on Jesus’ teaching concerning salvation), Johnson’s biography is superbly written and deeply knowledgeable of Jesus’ life and times. It is consistently thought-provoking — not in the sense of offering a new image of Jesus, but in its ability to draw the reader inside the world of Jesus’ words and deeds. Despite the plethora of other works in this genre, “Jesus: A Biography From a Believer” is a welcome addition on the life of Jesus Christ.

For our Good Friday service, we wrote down a sin on a black sticky note and nailed it to a wooden cross at the front of the sanctuary. May God break the power of sin in our lives through his crucifixion.

Think about it like this: If you’re going to make up a fake story about someone arranging for Jesus’ body to be buried in his own tomb, why say he was a part of the very group that condemned Jesus and called him a blasphemer and turned him over to Pilate to be crucified? Why bother even giving him a name when there were people living in Jerusalem who actually knew the members of the Sanhedrin? Why put this group in any kind of a positive light at all? Unless that’s how things really went down. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the earliest Christians made up the report about Joseph of Arimathea and his involvement in Jesus burial

So, in the last few hours, I was called a heretic for not teaching that all Christians must observe the 7th day Sabbath. Then, I was a Judaizer for allegedly trying to make all Christians Jewish! Never a dull moment.

A one percent determination of the primordial deuterium abundance based on an absorption system 11 billion light years away provides yet another confirmation of the big bang creation model. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aaab53 …